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“Councillor [Paul] Myers, I would like to call on you to draw on this expertise so a framework can be adopted in the shortest possible time.”

Councillor Tim Ball said: “Are you consulting on something you’re going to do regardless? Is there any room for manoeuvre? If not, it’s not a consultation. This council has a reputation of not consulting on what it’s going to do.”

Forum member Nicolette Boater said the council had lost public trust, and residents should not have to resort to Freedom of Information requests to get information out of it.

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Councillor Joe Rayment said: “One issue is that people think of consultations are mini referendums.

“If they are going to be tokenism we may as well scrap them completely.

“Consultation needs to be meaningful or not happen at all.”

Mr Becker said: “We should have a lot more referenda. It would be easy to organise on Facebook. We could present a number of binary questions: ‘Do you prefer this kind of design or another?’ ‘Do you like X or Y?’

“We should be looking at ways to present a voting mechanism on more issues.”

Cllr Myers said there are issues like the budget that the council brings to groups like the Bath city forum for consultation, but they takes years to develop and their input is unlikely to change the outcome.

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He added: “There’s a sense of ‘why are you asking us then?’ That’s what causes confusion and consternation. A consultation is not a referendum.

“I’m not sure we always have a good definition of what we are trying to do.

“We can only move forward if we can reach a consensus.”

Councillor Myers said B&NES Council was good at involving outside bodies like town and parish councils - it recently updated its parish charter - and meets with groups like the Bath city forum and the third sector.

He added: “We as a community need to get better at working together to work out the consensus, rather that only getting the anger.

“Maybe the consultations are the problem. I think we have to work out the consultation for the consultation. I would like to involve as many people as possible. We need views from difficult to reach groups.

“If we did it on Facebook we’d get the charge that anyone without a computer would be excluded. We need to make sure the people who can’t use the process get involved.”

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